At the beginning of the twentieth century, to be a progressive, right-thinking American intellectual was to believe in the genetic superiority of certain racial groups. Otherwise known as eugenics or race science, the idea that races can be readily sorted along an immutable biological hierarchy had far-reaching policy implications, from marriage laws to immigration, and heavily influenced the racial policies of Nazi Germany. The logical conclusion of the belief that racial groups were inherently distinct from one another was that societal disparities between them must be a consequence of nature, rather than the results of a complex tangle of socioeconomic, cultural, historical and other demographic forces. At the time, to offer a critique of the prevailing vision of race, such as those made by Franz Boas and G. K. Chesterton, could have resulted in social stigma and opened up the critic to the charge of being on the wrong side of history.
What is considered progress at a given point in history can, with the passage of time and the advent of better information, come to look like the opposite. Nowhere is that juxtaposition more stark than on the loaded subject of race in America.
Progressive Racecraft
In their book Racecraft: The Soul Of Inequality In American Life, Karen and Barbara Fields argue that, contrary to popular belief, it isn’t the fact of race that creates the phenomenon of racism, but the historical development of racism that advances the notion of race. In other words, distrust and hostility towards nonwhite groups arose in the early colonies to vindicate those groups’ economic subjugation, and the belief in essential races of people was the cultural legacy of that dynamic. The term racecraft refers to all the ways in which we uphold the psycho-social construct of race, from subtle acts of projection to overt discrimination and brutal suppression. “Disguised as race, racism becomes something Afro-Americans are, rather than something racists do.” The one-drop rule under the systems of slavery and Jim Crow—whereby a drop of African blood made a person socially black even if their ancestry was largely European—is a clear example of the mental contortions necessary for racecraft.
Of course, it’s normal to notice when someone has a different skin color or hair texture from oneself (even infants notice this), and the idea of race is by no means a modern invention: discussions of race stretch back to ancient Greece and Rome and are part of the intellectual traditions of other civilizations, such as China and India. But the specific social significance injected into those superficial differences is part of the unique heritage of modern Americans. When we look at race through a sociological microscope, isolating it from other associated factors such as culture, ethnic background, national identity and politics—we are left with almost nothing of any meaning or value: it refers to the general region of the world most of a person’s recent ancestors came from and may imply a heightened or reduced risk of certain medical conditions at the margins. But race itself has no human weight.
Anti-racist proponents of the racecraft hypothesis, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, use it to attack the idea that racial disparities between white and black Americans are a result of internal group factors, as opposed to racist power and oppression. If race is downstream from racism, then racial inequality must be a consequence of racist policies and practices, since, in this view, racial disparities can only be caused by either white racism or black inferiority.
But the widespread progressive tendency to bundle together disparate ethnic groups, compare their outcomes on various metrics, and ascribe the difference to racism is its own version of racecraft. The limitations of this approach become clear when it is applied to any other disparity between two groups, such as the almost ten-year gap in life expectancy that advantages Asian-Americans over white Americans. It would be bizarre to claim that thousands upon thousands of whites would still be alive if only they had been Asian—even though the facts could be framed that way.
The progressive narrative on racism actually preserves the belief in distinct races of people with their own respective essences. I call this phenomenon progressive racecraft.
Progressive racecraft has two central manifestations: defending the use of racial categories in order to identify racism, and blurring the line between skin color and cultural norms in order to condemn appropriation. Let’s look at one example of each. In his book How to Be an Anti-Racist, Ibram X. Kendi argues against the idea of rejecting one’s whiteness or blackness by appealing to the logic of privilege and power: “Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways. Imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a classist world—it allows the ruling races and classes to keep on ruling.”
To Kendi, downplaying race is the same as denying the impacts of racism. But if belief in race is intimately tied up with racism, then Kendi’s logic is circular. Defending racial categorizations in the name of mitigating racism is like defending the distribution of deadly weapons in the name of mitigating murder. If racism created race, then “unlearning race,” as Thomas Chatterton Williams argues in his book of the same name, is a necessary step toward mitigating racism in society.
Coates offers an example of the second kind of progressive racecraft in a viral video from 2017 entitled “When Every Word Doesn’t Belong to Everyone” in which he argues against white people’s use of the N-word while reciting rap lyrics:
When you’re white in this country, you’re taught that everything belongs to you. You think you have the right to everything. You’re conditioned this way, it’s not cause your hair is a texture or your skin is light. It’s because the laws of the culture tell you this. For white people, the experience of being a hip-hop fan and not being able to use the word “nigga” is actually very insightful. It will give you just a little peek into the world of what it means to be black.
The implication is that hip-hop belongs to black Americans in a way that it doesn’t belong to other groups, and whites who want to participate are just acting entitled as a consequence of their historic privilege. But the sentiment that whites don’t really get hip-hop is thrown into sharp relief by the sea of whiteness in the crowd at almost any rap show. Artificial racial boundaries clearly don’t stop people from identifying with a culture, and a robust, pluralistic social landscape would encourage cross-cultural exchange between different groups. Whether or not it’s a good idea for anyone to use the N-word, the belief that people who look a certain way or have a certain ancestry have exclusive ownership over a given culture is reductive, essentialist, reactionary, and unsustainable in an increasingly diverse multi-ethnic and multicultural society.
Going Backwards
White supremacy was an abomination because it ascribed moral meaning to the arbitrary and unchosen fact of skin color. Yet much of what constitutes antiracism today is effectively an inverse continuation of this misbegotten belief. We see this in the lack of emphasis on concrete policy issues and the focus on totalizing theories of whiteness, privilege and structural oppression. We see this in the conceptual expansion of the term racism from individual discriminatory behaviors to an unconscious systemic bias that is built into the edifice of society itself. We see this in the cynical tokenization of minorities to score political points. We see this in the way the racial double standards of the past are used to justify racial double standards in the present. We see this in the unwillingness to track the astounding racial progress of the past 60 years. We see this in how videos of black people being shot by police go viral, while equally gruesome videos of white people shot by police are largely ignored. We see this in the selective attribution of racial disparities between blacks and whites to antiblack racism, while neglecting disparities that run in the other direction. We see this in the progressive war against cultural appropriation that equates race with culture. We see this in the tendency to use race as a shorthand for inequalities that are not fundamentally about race.
The assumption underlying modern antiracist discourse is that racial identity per se really does matter. Moreover, it is insisted that we can’t create a better future until we come to terms with the past. But the answers to the problems of the present are not usually found in the past, otherwise they would have already been resolved: history is most useful in determining what not to do. Accounting for historical racism, then, can become an overcorrection that ultimately keeps the notion of race front and center in public life.
One recent example is a New York Times op-ed arguing against the use of blind auditions for entry into the New York Philharmonic orchestra. To preclude discrimination against historically marginalized groups by biased judges, auditions have traditionally been held behind a screen. But the relatively low proportion of black musicians in the orchestra leads the author to feel that true justice has not yet been achieved: “If the musicians onstage are going to better reflect the diversity of the communities they serve, the audition process has to be altered to take into fuller account artists’ backgrounds and experiences. Removing the screen is a crucial step.” In plainspeak, if we don’t know what the artist looks like, we can’t favor members of some groups over others to bring about racial parity.
This is a direct inversion of the American humanism that our civil rights leaders advanced when they argued for the end of legalized segregation. Worse, it exposes the conflict between the race-consciousness of today’s antiracist activists and the universalism of their forebears. We’re going backwards.
Like much racialized thinking of past eras, the present narrative is obsessed with unpacking the implications of racial disparities, under the misguided assumption that disparity is itself evidence of racism and that all groups would have equal outcomes in the absence of racial bias. While progressives of the early twentieth century broached this question through the prism of genetics, progressives of the early twenty-first century broach it through the prism of historical oppression. But disparities in group outcomes—whether in terms of health, crime, wealth or education—are not necessarily a consequence of either. Virtually no two ethnic groups in human history have ever achieved exactly equal outcomes on all measures, anywhere, ever, for reasons that aren’t necessarily related to external prejudice or internal deficiency. Disparity is the norm throughout human societies.
More crucially, instituting policies that disproportionately benefit the poor and dispossessed does not require the use of racial gaps. As a study by the left-leaning People’s Policy Project shows, the vast majority of the racial wealth gap occurs between the wealthiest 10% of white and black Americans, while the bottom 90% of each group is much more similar. Poverty is poverty is poverty. Moving beyond racial thinking would mean diagnosing inequalities across the population without using race as a proxy. As Adolph Reed has written of the racial COVID disparity:
As an aggregate statistical category, black people may appear especially vulnerable on average to Covid-19, for example, in relation to some other aggregate statistical categories to the extent that individuals classified or recognized as black are disproportionately poor and beset with risk factors associated with poverty. The heightened vulnerability would not be a function of being classified as black, per se. It is easy in the dubious shorthand of our prevailing race discourse to lose sight of the reality that racism is simply and quintessentially the belief that race is not merely a statistical reification but instead refers to populations defined by actual biological difference. And that belief is quintessentially racist whether or not it is linked to claims regarding inferiority or superiority. That is, racism is the belief that race is a category that defines and encapsulates natural populations. It does not. A claim that black people are especially vulnerable, as black people, to Covid-19 or any contagion is as preposterous as a claim that unicorns are especially vulnerable.
Moving Forward
If antiracists really believe race to be a fiction, the prospect of taking racial categories off the US Census altogether and no longer using group disparity as a yardstick for injustice should be earnestly considered. Beyond studying populations for medical and other research purposes, the system of racial categories in the US reinforces the idea that race carries implicit social significance.
The case against race has both descriptive and prescriptive components. Descriptively, racial categories are an inaccurate method of delineating groups. The category Asian-American, for example, includes 17 different ethnic groups and their descendants, from Cambodian-Americans to Indian- and Chinese-Americans, each with their own specific demographic and cultural profiles. Likewise, as Shelby Steele has observed,
When a teenager in East Los Angeles says he is Hispanic, he is thinking of himself within a group strategy pitched at larger America. His identity is related far more to America than to Mexico or Guatemala, where he would not often think of himself as Hispanic. In fact, “Hispanic” is much more a political concept than a cultural one, and its first purpose is to win power within the fray of American identity politics.
Racial categories promote thinking in terms of race. As the ethnic composition of the country rapidly changes over the coming decades, it’s imperative to consider which guiding principles will allow us to see past superficial differences and embrace what we have in common as citizens and human beings. At the moment, we’re doing a terrible job of this. We need a different vision for American society, what Ralph Ellison called a new American humanism, which views the diverse strands of American identity in positive-sum terms and rejects all forms of identity essentialism. This means dissociating the notion of race from our national culture and identity.
Of course, taking racial categories off the census won’t instantly obliterate all forms of bias, and the principle of identity-blindness can certainly become repressive if left unchecked. But that doesn’t mean that we should abandon the principle altogether. The possibility of a world in which our racial identities are socially meaningless is one worth aspiring toward, now more than ever.
50 comments
A bit late as it were.
I quite like the work of the late anthropologist Edward T Hall in which he describes the sensory and spatial zones/differences that define each culture.
One of the principal catalysts of racial and/or tribal prejudice is smell – those people who are not part of our group quite literally stink.
Hall was associated with both Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan whose work is essential for understanding how every new technology changes every aspect
of human culture in all kinds of unpredictable ways – a bit like the ever-changing complexity of FRACTALS
I also quite like the thesis proposed in the 1987 book by Jeremy Rifkin titled Time Wars The Primary Conflict in Human History
Discussions of America’s (and other Western industrial countries’) social, political, and cultural problems seem to be currently well-nigh monopolized by two rival “hegemonic discourses” (postmodern academese lingo for “dominant orthodoxies”), to the almost total exclusion of any other possibly illuminating viewpoints or perspectives. Almost everybody these days seems to be viewing politics, culture, and social relationships exclusively through the “lens” either of “critical race and gender theory” or else of evolutionary psychology, the primate brain, and the dangers of”bubbles” and “tribalism.” Apart of course from white supremacists, Alt-Rightists, and Trumpite Republicans, almost all our current commentators on politics, culture, and social relationships have in effect become disciples either of Michel Foucault, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Robin di Angelo, and Ta-Nehisi Coates or else of Robert Ardrey, Steve Pinker and Edward O. Wilson.
Our conflicts are interpreted in terms either of “white privilege,” “patriarchy,” “structural racism,” “sexism,” “intersectionality,” and “the Other,” typically in a jargon translated from that of Gallic gurus like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes, or else of “tribes,” “bubbles,” and “confirmation bias.” One “discourse” sees history, politics, and culture as little more than the story of straight white cis-gender European bourgeois males oppressing, exploiting, and excluding the “subaltern Other” in a “hegemonic gaze” (a “racialized” and “sexualized” gaze, *tout naturellement*). The other “discourse” understands history, culture and politics instead as essentially the story of people impelled by primate brains evolved on the Pliocene East African veld to huddle together in “tribes” and “bubbles” of the like-minded to nurse their “conformation bias” and shut out opposing views, aided and abetted by Internet and social-media algorithms.
As I just noted, other possible relevant or illuminating perspectives seem to be rarely ever discussed these days. If you aren’t a woke politically correct feminist anti-racist intersectional Social Justice Warrior, but are too fastidious to be an Alt-Right white supremacist in a MAGA hat waving a Confederate flag spouting “Cultural Marxism” and “white genocide” conspiracy theories, it’s almost a given that you’ll be talking about evolutionary psychology, tribalism, bubbles, confirmation biases, assortative mating (too many Republicans associate only with other Republicans, too many Democrats only marry other Democrats, and too many educated sophisticates move to the same hip urban neighborhoods), and the diabolically misleading character of Google algorithms and Facebook “likes.” You rarely ever hear any more, however, of the various interpretations of social and political behavior that once inspired lively academic and journalistic debates. All seems to be drowned out by “critical race and gender theory” and by neo-Darwinism–when not by Alt-Right snarkiness and conspiracy theorizing,.
You seldom hear any more, for example, about old-style Marxist economic determinism–except maybe indirectly, as in criticisms of Bernie Sanders for attacking economic inequality when he “should” have been talking more about race and gender inequities, or in the ridiculing of pundits who blamed “economic insecurity” for working-class Whites supporting Donald Trump in 2016, when they “should” instead have been denouncing those “deplorables’” racial bigotry! You almost never hear these days about status anxiety, status resentment, and the psychological ambiguities of social mobility, either, nor about the frequent tendency of newcomers to a group to overdo what they see as that group’s admirable qualities, as in the gaudy ostentation of the new-rich, the super-patriotism of immigrants, the ultra-orthodox piety of new religious converts, and the over-conscientiousness of women professionals! Freudian psychology, too, is a “lens” or “prism” quite seldom encountered any more–whatever became, I sometimes wonder, of the Oedipus Complex, of oral and anal personalities, and of the toilet training of the obsessively neat, clean, frugal, and conscientious? You don’t hear too much these days, either, about T. W. Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswik’s 1940’s and 1950’s studies of the “authoritarian personality.”
Current discussions of today’s right-wing populism, “Alt-Right,” white supremacism, anti-immigrant prejudices, “Trumpism,” attacks on “cultural elites,” and “fake news” controversies rarely ever refer to the 1950’s and 1960’s sociological analyses of that era’s “Radical Right” movements. Historians, sociologists, and political scientists like Richard Hofstadter, Peter Viereck, Daniel Bell, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan interpreted “Coughlinism,” “McCarthyism,” the John Birch Society, and the Goldwater and George Wallace movements as reflections of status anxieties and resentments. Far right movements like the supporters of Father Coughlin in the 1930’s, Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950’s, and of the John Birch Society, Barry Goldwater, and George Wallace in the 1960’s, these scholars argued, appealed very largely to groups in American society who were either insecurely upward-mobile or else fearfully downward-mobile, either rising but not fast or completely enough, or else declining from a formerly high or respectable status.
Such movements, they argued, appealed particularly to groups who had prospered or at least risen economically, but felt that they did not yet enjoy the respect and recognition to which they were entitled, such as second- and third-generation immigrants (especially Irish and German Catholics) feeling patronized by WASP Brahmins and the newly-rich (e.g., Texas oil millionaires and “Sun Belt” aerospace and electronics entrepreneurs) feeling snubbed by “old money.” They also equally applied, however, to formerly high-status groups, like many old-family WASP patricians and many rural and small-town Protestant fundamentalists, who felt their former secure status slipping away as newer groups (e.g., urban intellectuals of largely immigrant origin, government bureaucrats, and from the 1960’s onward also Black spokespeople) gained an influence, prestige, and social visibility seen as undeserved and illegitimate by the declining older “top-dogs.” Large numbers of these insecurely upward-mobile and resentfully downward-mobile folk, according to writers like Hofstadter, Viereck, Bell, Riesman, Glazer, etc., flocked to Joe McCarthy in the 1950;s, and then to the John Birch society, similar “Radical Right” groups, Barry Goldwater, and George Wallace in the 1960’s.
Beginning in the mid and late 1960’s, these analysts of the 1950’s and 1960’s populist Right often discussed the 1960’s “White Backlash” of working-class and lower-middle-class White (especially immigrant “ethnic”) resentment against Blacks. However, in the 1960’s they did not view American society through a simple binary Black/White racial “lens” or “prism” in the manner of today’s “critical race theorists” denouncing “structural racism,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility.” Rather, the Hofstadters, Bells, Riesmans, Glazers, and Moynihans presented a pluralist picture of many different ethnic, interest, and social groups all jockeying and competing for relative advantage and a degree of respectful recognition. Bell, Hofstadter, Riesman, Glazer, Moynihan, and their colleagues portrayed WASP’s, Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Slovaks, Germans, Scandinavians, Greeks, “Negroes,” “Puerto Ricans,” the old-rich, and the new-rich as all similarly competing and jostling, at times maybe a bit rudely, for “a piece of the action,” “a slice of the pie,” “a share of the graft,” and “a place in the sun.”
The “Negroes” and “Puerto Ricans,” in this scenario, were portrayed as just two more ethnic groups on their way up, rather like the Irish, Italians, Jews, Germans, or Poles, though admittedly with some special challenges. The history of slavery, segregation, and lynching was certainly not denied–but they were placed in a context of discrimination, prejudice, and even violence experienced by other American ethnic groups. Slavery was a great tragedy indeed–but it was echoed by the 2,000-year persecution of the Jews, while lynching was offset by pogroms and the Holocaust. Southern “Jim Crow” was paralleled by the immigration restrictions of the 1920’s against Southern and Eastern European immigrants, by the Nordic-supremacist attacks of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard on those East and South European “lesser breeds,” by the quotas on Jewish students at Ivy League universities, by the exclusion of Jews from elite clubs and resorts, by the 19th century “No Irish Need Apply” signs on posh WASP hotels and restaurants, by the difficulties of a brilliant Jewish scholar like Lionel Trilling in finding an Ivy League teaching job in the 1940’s, etc. Unlike today’s “critical race theorists” with their stark “binary” black-and-white oppressor/victim dichotomy, the status-politics analysts of the 1950’s and 1960’s were sensitive to all the fine gradations of snobbery among the comparatively privileged and the subtle nuances of milder forms of discrimination among the relatively less privileged. Nowadays, however, it is dismissed as an exercise in frivolous triviality to obsess, say, over people not being invited to a charity ball, cotillion, country club, or fraternal organization–after all, it’s argued, what is a non-invitation to some fancy-dress party or exclusive club in comparison to Auschwitz or to Jim Crow lynching? The very real obstacles once faced by MANY ethnic groups in full acceptance into American society are just ignored these days.
Our current crop of “critical race/gender theorists,” but also the evolutionists bemoaning “bubbles” and bashing the Internet, appear to ignore the psychology of “countersignaling,” or “showing off by not showing off.” That is the strategy of people so confident of their desirable qualities that they feel no need to flaunt them, in contrast to the often exaggerated displays felt necessary by people with only a moderate amount of the good qualities in question–whether of wealth, social status, intelligence, education, competence, or strength. This contrast of anxiously active signaling of one’s valuable qualities versus confidently casual countersignaling explains the gaudy displays of the newly-rich versus the more restrained consumption of the established old-money rich, a contrast already noted by Thorstein Veblen in his classic “The Theory of the Leisure Class.”
However, countersignaling also explains why immigrants and their children so often display a zealous patriotism or even chauvinism, why converts to a religion are often fervently pious and fanatically orthodox (“more Papal than the Pope”) as against the often more easy-going religiosity of “cradle believers,” and why women in business, academia, and the professions usually feel they must be “twice as good” as their male colleagues in order to be accepted or taken seriously, to diligently “lean in” to prove their dedication and professionalism. The middle class (especially the lower-middle class, anxious to distinguish themselves from blue-collar workers and especially from slum-dwellers) proverbially being bastions of ultra-respectable mainstream culture, while privileged youth so often scorn “up-tight” petit bourgeois propriety and embrace counter-cultural lifestyles, is still another familiar example of countersignaling at work.
So, I wonder, where are the Richard Hofstadters, Peter Vierecks, Daniel Bells, David Riesmans, Nathan Glazers, Daniel Patrick Moynihans, and Seymour Martin Lipsets of our own time?
Evidently you don’t know biology, never mind evolution theory, nor that science is always interactive across disciplines if not multi-disciplinary in a thoroughgoing way re any complex topic.
You seem not even to have spotted that psychoanalysis has been scientifically dead for decades — not that it was ever alive: it was never in any way scientific.
Investigation of race differences has long produced an extensive literature and there has been little contribution by evolutionary psychology, and when there has been it’s been part of a cross-disciplinary approach.
Apart from clear differences in morphology there are those in physiology, and in disease/condition, and cognition, attitudes.
For a very long time it has been obvious that a major basis of race difference is cold adaptation, and more recently this has been extended to look into the technological and social ramifications of this; notably the big differences in length of experience with agriculture. Then there are geographical considerations that can have an impact on the degree of separation and size of groups, thereby giving rise to differences in conflict patterns and the consequent adaptations.
The elapse of time together with the profound separation of major race groups cannot other than have produced significant evolved differences, not least cognitive, as is shown by studies examining the extent of changes to genes expressed in the brain pertaining to social functioning.
The dominant political perspectives have contributed at best chaff to the discussion, being non- or anti-scientific; but, worse, have been intentionally malicious, having arisen as part of Left backlash against the masses for not acting according to Marxist prescription: what you ignorantly dismiss knee-jerk fashion as ‘conspiracy theory’ (when ‘conspiracy’ is neither alleged or required; and likewise re ‘theory’, when there’s the documented history).
“Literally didn’t say there were no biological differences, just none that are worthy of social relevance.”
Is that a conclusion that you have reached after examining all possible racial variations for any possibly “worthy” (meaning undefined) relevance in all possible social systems ?
Or was it an a priori statement made to conform with an ideological dogma ?
To my mind, variations in life expectancy and resistance to disease in a population are socially relevant. Even variation in metabolism of different foods has social relevance, as it would effect modes of production and distribution, pastoral or horticultural for example.
And that’s just a few before I start lighting matches around the politically dynamite questions of IQ and Race.
Any genetic variation that effects behavior will effect the society and hence will be socially relevant. Maybe that is “Unworthy” of your consideration, but the effects will still be there if you consider them or not.
Fantastic work, Samuel! A very well-reasoned and well-written piece. Thank you.
Ray, on “real science being done… genetics is roughly half of the prediction of social outcome.”
Can you steer us to some of the best work on that claim?
“Can you steer us to some of the best work on that claim?”
Check out ‘A New Radical Centrism’ group on Facebook, the boss has linked to dozens of studies on this kind of thing. Mind, you’ll have to just start scanning, nothing is in any particular order.
It’s MORE than half, or, rather, gene/environment is a false apportioning, falling foul of basis information theory, for a start: the environment is not determinant here, because the genome has evolved to seek, find and utilise only a tiny subset of possible stimuli.
See the SYMPOSIUM ON THE QUESTION “HOW IS CULTURE BIOLOGICAL?”
Six Essays and Discussions: Essay # 1 Culture IS Biology: Why We Cannot ‘Transcend’ Our Genes — Or Ourselves
Politics & Society (journal) April 2010
Abstract
Culture, far from being some new trajectory of evolution (and, as posited by niche-construction theory, even a major new source of selection pressure), is evolved social psychology in action, feeding back to reinforce it. We become actually ever better at expressing our genes in evolving greater flexibility: the very opposite of the freedom Daniel Dennett contends evolves. Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins likewise hold profoundly mistaken positions that we “transcend” our genes. A much more radical bottom-up conceptualisation of the social sciences is required; with psychology and sociology subsumed under systems-biology.
I myself think it’s both. Culture is not independent of genetics but neither is it absolutely determined either. German culture and French culture are more different than genetics can explain.
Hi Ray.
Of course nothing can entirely determine or be accurately assessed as to the proportion of determination: there is always chance, ‘butterfly effects’, unexpected interactions, hitherto unknown or never-known factors …
The issue is SYSTEMATIC determinants. Little in the environment fits the bill.
Our behaviour within our cultures feeds back to reinforce the biology—optimising and making it more efficient. So it is that culture is very much a part of biology, not merely growing out of it to progress thereafter on an autonomous track. Such feedback necessarily takes place, or why would our facility to create culture have evolved? (Human culture hardly resembles a Gouldian “spandrel”.) The relationship between any organism and its social system necessarily is a “hall-of-mirrors” precluding novel trajectory, and not just in the short-term (as I will duly explain). Human culture is often, even usually regarded as being “above” biology because of extra-genetic modes of cross-generational transmission of cultural product, but an additional mode of transmission is of little consequence unless what is being transmitted is truly novel. For the above-mentioned reasons, it is not. We can see, then, that Edward O Wilson understated the reality when long ago he pointed out that culture is always “held on a leash” from biology, never escaping it. Yet Daniel Dennett, the philosopher who has most concerned himself with evolution, sees an actually weaker tie; substituting for Wilson’s leash an infinitely elastic cord. He believes, as in the title of his book-length exposition, that Freedom Evolves. Certainly the facility to cognise and behave flexibly evolves; and given that this is instrumental to everything on which it is built, then it serves to make the human organism more efficient in interacting with its environment; not least with conspecifics. Consequently, biology and the genome encoding it, far from being usurped actually are still better expressed. In a non-trivial sense, therefore, we become ever more the slaves of our biology and our genes, just as we are provided with the illusion of being progressively freer of them.
That’s a powerful post Steve.
“The issue is SYSTEMATIC determinants.”
I think you’re right to make the distinction. Arguing matters of degree is difficult for the obvious reason. Indeed even when we think of as culture being separate from biology, it is by no means separate. Yet Canadians and Americans have different cultures in a way that is not biological. So it really is a bit of both. How much? I don’t think we can put numbers on it.
Cheers.
Well I do do research and publish on this stuff.
There is a minuscule difference between US and Canadian culture. From a Brit perspective (mine) it’s hard to spot.
As I say, human culture varies actually very little: in all important respects human culture is identical. For example, all human cultures feature pair-bonding and in the form of polygyny: the only difference is in the degree to which it is overt / covert. Much of any cultural difference there is, amounts mostly to in-group marking, and in this there is necessarily difference, with the entire point of it being to demarcate groups.
“There is a minuscule difference between US and Canadian culture.”
For us the difference is quite noticeable. Anyway I agree that much if not most of it stands directly on biology.
Although the concept hasn’t been clearly defined here or elsewhere let us assume it pertains to population bias of some sort (preference, preservation, superiority, prejudice, racialist discrimination etc). It is probably correct to say that race would not exist without racism, but short of a global catastrophe disabling intercontinental travel, it is definitely correct to say that race will not exist without racism. The Fsts between Pan troglodytes subspecies are between 0.1 and 0.4. The Fsts between intercontinental Homo sapiens sapiens are between 0.1 and 0.2.
“correct to say that race *would* not exist without racism, but short of a global catastrophe disabling intercontinental travel, it is definitely correct to say that race *will* not exist without racism.”
“Would” vs. “will”?
Please clarify the point of all this.
In an era approaching and often facilitating whole genome analysis, subspecies (ie empirical race) are best identified, confirmed and revised using automated clusterisation of genetic data and comparing identified populations at different levels/gradations/resolutions of clusterisation (k=3,4,5 clusters etc). This eliminates any potential researcher bias to categorise/subdivide one species using different qualitative/quantitative standards than another (or “speciesism” as it were). Qualifications reside with gene flow etc.
Fst (fixation index) is a measure of genetic distance between populations, and it is calculated based on a function of the number of shared vs discrepant alleles between two populations.
Fst calculated genetic diversity between subspecies will vary between species. For example, the average Fst between (pairs within) 6 subspecies of Melospiza melodia (song sparrow) is 0.018 (Mikles 2020), far lower than what is ordinarily prescribed to mammalian subspecies (typically between 0.05 and 0.2). Therefore, in order to relate/interpret Fst calculations between populations (and their implications for subspecies classification), it is best to compare the genetic diversity of subspecies categorisation between close genetic relatives. The nearest existent genetic relatives of humans (Homo sapiens) are chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), with Bonobos being a close contender.
Four (possibly five) subspecies of the chimpanzee have currently been recognised in the literature:
– Central (Pan troglodytes troglodytes)
– Western (Pan troglodytes verus)
– Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti/vellerosus)
– Eastern (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii)
– Southeastern (Pan troglodytes marungensis)
We happen to have some of the best data on human genetic diversity because so much genome sequencing resources have been devoted to them relative to other species. To see an example of the clusterisation of human biodiversity, see Rosenberg et al (2002).
At a k=3 clusterisation, the avg Fst between intercontinental Homo sapiens populations is approximately 0.15 (inferred from Nelis et at. 2009). Intercontinental human population Fsts vary between 0.1 and 0.2:
Between Europeans (CEU/Italians) and Sub-Saharan Africans (Yoruba/Hausa): 0.153 (Nelis ea 2009), 0.14 (Fischer ea 2006)
Between East-Asia (Chinese) and Europeans: 0.110 (Nelis ea 2009), 0.09 (Fischer ea 2006)
Between East-Asia (Chinese) and Sub-Saharan Africans: 0.192 (Nelis ea 2009), 0.15 (Fischer ea 2006)
The average Fst between identified chimpanzee subspecies is approximately 0.2. Chimpanzee subspecies Fsts vary between 0.1 and 0.4:
Western : Nigeria-Cameroon – 0.3931 (Schmidt ea 2019), 0.190 (Bowden ea 2012)
Western : Central – 0.3497 (Schmidt ea 2019), 0.177 (Bowden ea 2012), 0.29 (Fischer ea 2006/Becquet ea 2007)
Western : Eastern – 0.39381 (Schmidt ea 2019), 0.32 (Fischer ea 2006/Becquet ea 2007)
Nigeria-Cameroon : Central – 0.19914 (Schmidt ea 2019), 0.134 (Bowden ea 2012),
Nigeria-Cameroon : Eastern – 0.24221 (Schmidt ea 2019),
Central : Eastern – 0.09771 (Schmidt ea 2019), 0.09 (Fischer ea 2006/Becquet ea 2007)
Note that there are some subspecies of chimpanzee that exhibit less genetic uniqueness than intercontinental human populations.
With respect to your question, if we rigorously define “racism” as the execution of any bias towards one population of humans over another (including reproductive selection etc), absent physical blocks to human travel, human populations will rapidly converge at each generation of non-discriminatory coupling, and humanity will cease to exhibit the levels of differentiation/clusterisation identified above. Furthermore, much biodiversity will be eliminated, as most biological traits are complex rather than simple, relying on the interaction of many loci, meaning it becomes increasingly unlikely for the original phenotypes to emerge after x generations of non-discriminatory coupling.
While it is possible the original divergence of Homo sapiens may have been the product of curiosity or individual resource constraints rather than intergroup competition between lineages/populations (the biological adaptation facilitating most of the linguistic overloadings of racism identified), it is however certainly correct to say that race will not exist into perpetuity without racism. In fact, on historical time scales, after just a few generations of non-discriminatory global coupling (between 3 and 20), existent clusterisations will rapidly diminish.
References:
Rosenberg, N. A., Pritchard, J. K., Weber, J. L., Cann, H. M., Kidd, K. K., Zhivotovsky, L. A., & Feldman, M. W. (2002). Genetic structure of human populations. science, 298(5602), 2381-2385.
Fischer A, Pollack J, Thalmann O, Nickel B, Paabo S (2006) Demographic history and genetic differentiation in apes. Curr Biol 16
Becquet, C., Patterson, N., Stone, A. C., Przeworski, M., & Reich, D. (2007). Genetic structure of chimpanzee populations. PLoS Genet, 3(4), e66.
Bowden, R., MacFie, T. S., Myers, S., Hellenthal, G., Nerrienet, E., Bontrop, R. E., … & Mundy, N. I. (2012). Genomic tools for evolution and conservation in the chimpanzee: Pan troglodytes ellioti is a genetically distinct population. PLoS Genet, 8(3), e1002504.
Schmidt, J. M., de Manuel, M., Marques-Bonet, T., Castellano, S., & Andres, A. M. (2019). The impact of genetic adaptation on chimpanzee subspecies differentiation. PLoS genetics, 15(11), e1008485.
Nelis, M., Esko, T., Mägi, R., Zimprich, F., Zimprich, A., Toncheva, D., … & Jakkula, E. (2009). Genetic structure of Europeans: a view from the north-east. PloS one, 4(5), e5472.
Mikles, C. (2020). Genomic differentiation and local adaptation on a microgeographic scale in a resident songbird.
I agree with the overall article. I would have picked a better example of a white victim of police violence, such as Tony Timpa.
Racism is not based on skin color alone but on a presumption of “inferior” and “tainted blood.” Unfortunately, many blacks and liberals support the “one drop” myth based on the idea of allegedly super-inferior “black blood” (exempting the “black blood” in Hispanics and Arabs, since they are too powerful to offend) destroying whiteness forever.
https://medium.com/@mischling2nd/its-not-rachel-dolezal-who-s-crazy-but-the-ridiculous-racist-and-contradictory-definitions-of-7a1da0a404f0
I wonder if Ta-Nehesi would be happy to see hip-hop music disappear from the face of the earth. Without legions of young white fanboys “culturally appropriating” it, rap music would cease to exist as a commercial genre. Think of all the newly impoverished rap stars who would have to get real jobs.
Well the ‘music’ can’t disappear, ‘cos music it ain’t. And as lyric it’s embarrassing doggerel with the rhyming inane beyond belief. As for content, it’s inciting violence and general hate-mongering that no ‘white’ person would get away with.
True, hip-hop did a service to pop in highlighting the importance of speech rhythm, but the legacy is wall-to-wall flat-melody, same-style pop music stuck in a rut for decades.
If ever music needed a revolution it’s the boring trash music scene as it has now long been.
“just none that are worthy of social relevance”
Yet social success tracks IQ more accurately than almost any other metric except IIRC the presence of fathers. 85% of American negroes have below average intelligence. You can try to explain that away, but it won’t go away. Whites of similar intelligence have similar outcomes. There is still real science being done on the question and it seems genetics is roughly half of the prediction of social outcome. Whatever racism might really exist is easily overcome if other factors are positive. A Ben Carson or a Thomas Sowell are going to succeed whatever their race is.
Whether there is evolutionary basis, whereby whites have a reason to fear blacks, or whereby French have a reason to fear those who speak German, is irrelevant to the issue of what standards whites, or French, should use to assess, whether or not to avoid **large** groups of blacks or Germans.
“what may appear hostility to the out-group actually is a shadow of ensuring conformity….”
It need not be Conformity, in any loaded sense of that word.
It need be only “sufficient trustworthiness as to warrant taking risks with them?”, e.g. Derb’s son mostly hanging with whites, while avoiding **large** groups of blacks.
It is a superficial reading of blank to say that blank is a cultural construct. We humans build cultural constructs around everything we encounter. The fact of a cultural construct having been constructed, or its construction being shoddy, outright dangerous, or just mildly annoying or inconvenient does not make blank a social construct in and of itself. The fact that people would repeatedly and independently build cultural constructs around it, on the other hand, suggests that blank is a real thing that exists.
Hi again Samuel.
Well they do.
The problem in looking at culture is that sociologists / cultural anthropologists are looking for differences (just as people ordinarily do), which tend to be superficial — varations on a common theme as the same biology is culturally expressed in conditions that may (are almost bound) to an extent vary systematically. After all, we have a keen eye for in-group markers, so that we can ‘police’ our own group. Evolutionary biologists / biological anthropologists instead look for the underlying similarities.
Clear away any extremely recent cultural veneer and those of African racial type will be more similar to each other than to those of either Asian or European stock, notwithstanding extremely recent contrasting cultural milieu.
“research now shows that cohesion with such as a migrant enclave is through ‘in-group love’ rather than ‘outgroup hate’ “.
OK, but I wonder if such research considered the prospect, that ‘in-group love’ overlaps with, not ‘outgroup hate’, but ‘outgroup’ fear.
Eight+ years ago, Derbyshire was tossed from NR, on account of Leftist rage at his “The Talk: Non-black Version” essay, in which he urged his son to avoid **large** groups of blacks, owing to his fear that c. 5% of them **really** hate whites.
These Leftists (purportedly) couldn’t imagine, that Derb could authentically (and reasonably) fear for his son’s **safety**, and instead spun this fear as prima facie proof of his “Racism”.
If feminists move to avoid (esp. young) men (esp. at night, in secluded places), is that Sexism, irrespective of how “worthy of social relevance” race or gender are (in the abstract)?
Sometimes, prudence *requires* that in-group love implies out-group fear, even if Leftist spin-doctors would conflate that fear with “hate’.
What is or isn’t “worthy of social relevance” really depends on context, regardless of SJW obsessions vs. “racism” etc.
Well evidently not in the case of the sexes: females do not experience either dreams or delusions in mental illness where males pose a threat, indicating that there is no evolutionary basis whereby females have a reason to fear males, just as anticipated from what we know of the sexes & social structure, etc– not what feminist nonsense would have us believe..
As for male-male re race or any other basis of in-group marking, the roots appear to be male gate-keeping admission proper to the adult group, and ‘policing’ concerning this. In other words, what may appear hostility to the out-group actually is a shadow of ensuring conformity within your own group.
Hi Samuel
— I agree, btw, with your central argument that the ‘identity politics’ quasi-religionist bigots are just as bad than historical racists — actually they’re worse: historical racists were not willfully ignorant and didn’t hate their own people.
There ARE biological differences of the races, though, that are of ‘social relevance’: apparently underpinning the cultural differences between the ‘big three’ (if thus we could term them) — African, Asian and European.
It would be astonishing if there were not profound evolved racial differences given the completeness and longevity of separation. The morphological differences are obvious, and metabolic and other systemic function is easily discovered. It’s known that there has been major recent and relatively recent evolution in genes concerning brain function concerning social behaviour.
And note that the facility to exhibit culture is a biological phenomenon that can have evolved only inasmuch as it can function to feed back to fine-tune and reinforce the biology that gave rise to it. Cultural difference will directly and importantly reflect biology, including emerging group-level biological differences when the separation and timescale is as great as between the three major racial categories. And the more we are cultural, actually the more faithful we are to our biology, not less.
Thanks. You’re saying biological race has relevance because it reflects how a culture develops? I don’t understand that. By the logic, African immigrants from the West Indies, for example, would have more in common culturally with Black Americans than other ethnic groups in the U.S.? Seems shaky.
Steve, with all due respect it seems you’ve completely missed the point of the article and have presented a vernacular perspective rather than a scientific one. Race is not an objective division in the world. That is, it does not exist prior to or independently of people’s beliefs and practices. You are correct in noting that genetic variation exists between categories of race (though there is much MORE genetic variation WITHIN socially defined race categories than between them). Yet, biological correlates of socially defined categories of race do not turn the social categories into biological ones.
Come again?!
You’re talking total, unbelievable nonsense.
You need to at least start reading up on race difference.
You could start with reading my comments here.
* For a succinct demolition of the lame ‘variation’ argument, see pp117-123 of the book ‘Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History’, by Nicholas Wade, the former deputy editor of Nature journal.
[It always amazes me that individuals feel they can make pronouncements on topics that require at least a modicum of relevant scientific knowledge, yet feel no need to acquire it.].
“You are correct in noting that genetic variation exists between categories of race”
Thus race is a concept that refers to something biologically real. That people have socially constructed all sorts of extra stuff with which to overload ‘race’ is not disputable but it does not change biological reality.
I’m aware of Wade’s book which misrepresented evolutionary biology, offered scant evidence for its claims, was wrong on many of the facts, and within which the author himself noted he was “leaving the world of hard science and entering into a much more speculative arena.” Offering the naive ramblings of such a man as evidence of your views suggests that you are somehow predisposed to a racialist view point and are using the imprimatur of Wade’s professional background as a backstop against claims of irrationality and illogic. Nevertheless, I believe you can change your views if you’re willing to be challenged.
Allow me to put a finer point on what I stated in my previous comment. Race is constituted by practices of identification, classification, and categorization. It is not constituted by the facts of genetic difference. The infinite multiplicity of variation in people’s genetic make-up is not constitutive of the phenomenon of race, even if some such differences correlate with the categories.
Race is an ideology–a rough and ready way of making sense of the world–and does not emerge from observable differences between people. Quoting Karen and Barbara Fields, race is the “doctrine that nature produced humankind in distinct groups, each defined by inborn traits that its members share and that differentiate them from the members of other distinct groups of the same kind but of unequal rank.” In a Fieldsian (and generally, in a constructivist or subjectivist view), race is the core product and principal unit of racism. The practice creates the category of difference–not the other way around. I hope you don’t waste your precious life trying to prove the opposite.
I’ll end with a note on Samuel’s argument, which focuses on the limitations and circularity of race reductionism. This is a welcomed intervention since, as Rogers Brubaker put it so eloquently, race reductionism is abstract, ahistorical, and essentializing. Judging by the spirit of the comments on his piece, it seems a rejoinder against “racialist reductionism” is in full order because troglodyte objectivists are rearing their heads.
Guffaw!
Does he hell as like ‘misrepresent’ evolution theory.
Nicholas Wade was the deputy editor of Nature journal and outlines from a position of considerable knowledge about evolution theory and genetics.
What ideological drivel you spout.
You some self-appointed brownshirt enforcer of ‘PC’ fascism?
“What ideological drivel you spout.
You some self-appointed brownshirt enforcer of ‘PC’ fascism?”
You aren’t unintelligent Steve but it’s too bad that you have the manners of a jackass. Why don’t you engage on the topic instead of being rude? Pardon. But I’d like to read a discussion of the topic, not waste time reading insults.
?
I was replying, not initiating, and not in kind with unwarranted nasty prejudicial abuse either.
Are you saying posters are obliged to be friendly in response to appalling posts?
It hardly deserved even a point in reply; or any reply at all.
J:
I wasn’t going to respond to this because nothing ever comes of it, but you make your case so well that I can’t get your post out of my mind. Ignoring your attack on Wade — I take it you don’t agree with him and thus he is wrong if not outright evil — your own argument is powerful:
You keep saying what ‘race is’. If I granted your authority to tell us what ‘race is’ then you’d carry the point automatically that, as you define it, race is indeed an evil social construction who’s only purpose is oppression. What is cool about your post is that you aren’t wrong so much as half right. What you do IMHO is substitute race the biological fact for race the social construction and then pretend that race the biological fact does not exist and even if it does, we sweep it away as the dust left behind after we demolish race the social construction.
Alas race the biological fact does exist. 85% of American negroes have below average intelligence. This fact cannot be made to go away. And yes, ideologies have been built on race even as ideologies are built on nationality. Are the French and the Germans different in a scientific way? Hardly very much, yet they ‘construct’ the difference between themselves for all the usual tribal reasons. We should be cognizant that the French and the Germans are not really different nearly as much as they pretend.
When it comes to race our social engineers have tried hard to pretend that the differences between the races are just the same — nothing but social constructions — but after 60 years of pretending we see that pretending is not working. Gaps are actually widening again. I say that even more zealous pretending is not going to work either and that we should consider being honest. This won’t be easy because politically correct lying is now our state religion. Nevertheless I recommend we consider it. Let’s make a dichotomy — let’s separate the social constructions from the biological facts not try to handle them the same way.
[in response to Ray, in his response to J F]
Yes, race is a biological fact and yes it is also a social construct in that race is an obvious distinguishing feature to function as an in-group marker, and often taken to be one, but to take race in this way is arbitrary and just one possibility out of whatever range of distinguishing features there may be. So it’s an arbitrary-set phenomenon: it’s substrate neutral, as it were.
An in-group marker can be the basis of prejudice, but again there is no specificity here re race. Prejudice is an evolved psychology essentially against males perceived to be ‘different’, with race being just one possible indication of ‘difference’.
So it’s absurd to see racism as some especially pernicious or foundational prejudice. It is not.
See my paper:
The Falsity of Identity Politics: Negative Attitude is Towards Males who are Different, in Policing Sexual Access by Gate-Keeping Group Membership’. New Male Studies 8(2), 20-51. ABSTRACT Identity politics (often dubbed political correctness: PC) victim categories (protected characteristics) are shown to be false. Negative attitude is specifically towards males, and evoked by any form of significant difference. Previous findings that misogyny has no scientific basis, with the evidence instead of philogyny and misandry, extend to apply across all victim categories, trumping race or sexual orientation. This is revealed in the predominance of males as hate crime victims, the harsher attitude towards apparently more masculine subsets of sexual minority and race, and experimentally. Supposed homophobia is revealed to be a far wider phenomenon, encompassing all victim categories, manifest culturally in male initiation and scientifically evidenced across fields. It functions to gate-keep male full admission to the group, serving to police male sexual access, maximising reproductive efficiency, not to deal with out-group threat, nor to oppress (least of all females). Identity politics is extreme misrepresentation of social and inter-personal reality.
I agree. Race is a fact, but what we ‘do’ with that fact is another matter. We use it as a group segregator.
Well, it was the Left that used to insist on ‘colour blindness’: it was the Left that then insisted on ‘colour segregation’.
As usual, the Left take the line of whatever at the time is most likely to cause social dislocation, in their philosophically, historically and scientifically illiterate notion that you have to destroy the current society and build from ‘year zero’.
That’s the very last thing that should ever be done.
We need to get back to ‘colour blindness’, junking ‘multiculturalism’, though at the same time adopt an attitude of realism, recognising that groups self-demarcate on race criteria, and that this causes problems, but getting this in perspective in that lots of research now shows that cohesion with such as a migrant enclave is through ‘in-group love’ rather than ‘outgroup hate’.
I completely agree.
Hi Ray, I want to return to your assertion that “race is a biological fact.” Two points here. 1) You may be unaware that your assertion has more in common with the realm of superstition than the realm of science. 2) It is also the premise of an argument not based in logical reasoning.
On the first point, what I suppose you mean to say is “race is real.” Taking another cue from Barbara and Karen Fields (you should really check out their book!), race exists in the same way that the equator exists, or that per capita annual income exists (or that Santa Claus exists, sorry kids). Put another way, when race is presented as a statistical abstraction (to note wealth gaps, achievement gaps, etc.), one can easily assume that these statistical generalizations define individuals or groups. Yet they don’t anymore than per capita income or average height do. And as I’ve noted, there is more genetic variation within socially defined race categories than between them. Thus, appealing to statistical abstractions to prove race is a biological fact commits the common error of confusing genetic distinctions with racial distinctions.
On the second point, asserting that race is a biological fact because you have observed differences between “the races” waves away the very thing that needs to be explained, namely, what constitutes a race. Unfortunately, it’s circular logic. In order to claim that race is a biological fact, you have to define certain characteristics as racial. Then, you have to offer the differences between these characteristics as proof that “races” differ. This logic just doesn’t carry any weight. An analogy for you: It’s like saying judicial review is the reason why the Supreme Court (in the U.S.) can declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. Judicial review is the name of the process. It’s not an explanation of how it came to be regarded as a power that belonged to the court!
I won’t belabor the point much more, but circular logic is not only a phenomenon that afflicts those who cling to the idea that race is a biological reality. A similar kind of circularity can be found in arguments made by race reductionist liberals. For example, it is often claimed that racism is the cause of racial injustice. However, claiming racism “did” something is not an etiological diagnosis, it’s a taxonomic diagnosis. It offers us a way to categorize the causal phenomena but it doesn’t tell us what the causal phenomena is.
J Fleming continues to talk haughty political nonsense. Race is very real indeed. Pointing to the existence of the all too obvious differences between major racial groups is anything but “superstition” and IS firmly based in logical reasoning. “Superstition” is the realm of those who are in denial here, which is through their extreme ideological stance.
It is fallacious to posit that racial differences are “statistical abstractions”. Races are identified by clusters of traits, which are not independent of each other but mutually correlated, so it is not necessary to possess all of the traits to be easily distinguished according to racial group.
The major races differ genetically to the tune of about 15% — that is, there is genetic variation of 15% between racial groups — which is greater than the group differences between what are classified as sub-species in many species.
It is irrelevant that there is far more variation within than between racial groups, as has long and often been pointed out.
J Fleming’s claims are false.
“You may be unaware that your assertion has more in common with the realm of superstition than the realm of science.”
I would reverse the charge and say that your assertion has more in common with political correctness than with science. That species diverge — forming races (or subspecies if you prefer) in the process — is the bedrock of evolutionary theory.
“race exists in the same way that the equator exists”
No, that’s not my claim and to the extend that anyone wants to turn race into some sort of hard category then I agree that’s wrong. I also agree that this ‘layer’ of social construction exists and that it should be fought. But it is a bridge too far to try to claim that there are not such things as gene clusters, that these clusters do not have effects, and that these clusters are not more or less what we mean by race.
“there is more genetic variation within socially defined race categories than between them”
Indeed, which is why we should judge people as individuals. Nevertheless the broader variation does exist and it does go some way to explaining broad differences in outcome.
“namely, what constitutes a race”
Genetic clustering based on heredity, tied closely to geographic origin, is what constitutes it. If humans were not prone to make special rules for themselves, the Koisan and the Mongolians would be labeled as subspecies of Homo Sapiens.
“you have to define certain characteristics as racial”
I’ve never met a more clever debater on this subject! ‘Jack’ on Quillette Circle comes close but he’s not as sharp as you are. No, you do not have to define any characteristic as ‘racial’ a priori. The genes cluster as they might, we notice the clustering after the fact. We notice that Mongoloids have rounder heads than Negroes. We notice that the latter have darker skin. Scientist explain the later quite easily. Is there an explanation for the former? I haven’t heard it but maybe their is.
What it all comes down to is the social implications. The woke are demanding race based reparations and at the same time claiming that race does not exist! But we are demanded that medical tests be made ‘race aware’ (good idea actually) even tho race is only a social construction! If Negroes who’s genetics traces back to a certain tribe in West Africa dominate the 100 meter dash, that is not racism it’s just that those guys can run fast, but if Jews dominate the Nobel Prizes, that’s racism. The woke want to have their racial cake and eat it too. If blacks dominate in the NBA, that’s because white boys can’t jump. If whites dominate in the pool, that’s Systemic Racism. I myself think we should try being a bit more honest. What we have now is comparable to saying that there’s no such thing as witches, but witchcraft is everywhere. There’s no such thing as race, but racism is Systemic. The whole of society is now chasing phantom problems while denying real ones. American urban black culture is profoundly dysfunctional, that’s a real problem. Systemic Racism is not.
Ray — The view that race is a biological fact is not tenable. Yet, I don’t blame you for believing it is. Echoes of the view underlie much of the writing in the genre. Let me provide an example of a tendency I often see among the PC-crowd that reinforces your mistaken belief and an analogy that demonstrates what I mean when I say race is an ideology, not a physical or biological fact or trait.
First, an example: well meaning, but ultimately misguided people often make a strange inference in the context of a police murder of a black man. They infer that the man was killed “because of the color of his skin.” This is an exemplar of a common and dangerous confusion people exhibit when talking about social life and race. If race were taken to be a physical fact about someone, say their skin color, then the statement would read that so-and-so was killed “because their skin color pulled the trigger” or perhaps “because their skin color is the preferable target of bullets.” Consider the causality in these statements. It doesn’t make sense. That’s because racism takes for granted the objective reality of race. And in so doing, it transforms one person’s action into another person’s trait. Thus, the person who pulled the trigger disappears and responsibility is shifted from the officer to the victim of the officer’s action. The point here is that racism is a social practice and that race is the outcome of that practice. Race isn’t real in a physical or objective way. It is real in an ideological way. It has meaning because social practice gives it meaning in a particular context.
Now the analogy. You’re driving through an American suburb in the late evening and turn off of your well-paved cul-de-sac onto a well-lit avenue. You’re in a red roadster and you pass by trees and parked cars. There’s a lingering scent of burnt rubber in the air. In the distance you see a stoplight exhibiting a steady green light. You switch gears, hoping to make the light and cross the intersection. Yet, within about 75 yards of the light the green abruptly shifts to yellow and then red. Instinctively, you take your foot off the pedal and begin to break, slowing down until you reach a complete stop. You sit there for about 45 seconds. No car goes by, yet you wouldn’t even think to go, not until a green light appears. As long as the light is red, you remain in place. For the purposes of our conversation about race as an ideology, I want you to consider this: does the color red hold some transhistorical sway over humans to render them physically incapable of going? Surely not, I hope you’ll agree. But now consider why people stop at a red light (assuming that this is a general practice for traffic regulation in most, but not all, societies). They stop because the red light derives its importance for the activity of driving from the historical, spatial, and social context in which it is placed. The ideological context tells the driver that the detail of which color is shining in the intersection is an important detail for the practice of safe driving. The idea that a red light, when pulled out of its context and placed anywhere–historically, spatially, socially–will always generate an unmediated reflex of psychic impressions, that it will ’cause’ people to stop represents a profound misunderstanding of social life, history, and human psychology. The consequence of viewing race as an ideology is that it forces us to recognize it as a historical product with a discernible, if not precisely datable, beginning. A red light signaling stop did not suddenly spring into being at the moment when cars and intersections came into contact with each other. Thus, the view that, for example, Africans constitute a race also must have arisen at a specific and ascertainable historical moment and was not a reflex among the first Europeans and Africans who came into contact with each other.
Ray, I just want to end by saying that some of your comments indicate that you’re part of the way there to seeing this. But there are still snags in your thinking. I’ll point out one. You say “[Race is constituted by] genetic clustering based on heredity, tied closely to geographic origin.” There are a few issues with this statement. Since you’re taking a highly abstract view, let’s assume we’re scientists looking at a statistical description of the characteristics of a given populations. The statistical description, which we’re calling race, would only remain valid as long as members of that certain population did not marry outside their group. An attempt to carry the concept further collapses into absurdity. And, for race to mean the same “genetic clustering” generation after generation, the heritable characteristics that define that cluster would have to be immutable. And if they were not immutable, then the idea that these clusterings designated distinct races of humans must also wither away.
Elementary confusion here by J Fleming.
That prejudice/discrimination/negative attitude according to target race is an arbitrary-set phenomenon does not mean race itself is arbitrary!
Scientific research and analysis of such as ‘hate crime’ stats reveals that negative attitudes on the basis of race indeed is in a sense a fiction in that what really is the target is ‘male + significant difference’. Race is an obvious basis of seeing difference in a male, hence race often appears to be the basis of negative attitude.
Of course, this has nothing to tell us about race itself, which has an exact parallel in biological identification of sub-species. The major racial groups indeed should be considered human sub-species. They ARE that different.
J Fleming here engages in the sort of sophistry into which a philosophical line of thinking readily collapses, and as usual is facilitated by ignorance of relevant science..
Your premises are false.
It’s anti-scientific nonsense to claim no biological difference between the ‘races’, or, as it is regularly put, none other than skin pigmentation, when anyone, never mind scientists in relevant fields, can see it’s also facial bone, other skeletal and muscle structure, overall body type, various different susceptibilities to disease and conditions, and contrasting attitudes and cognition. Even the former deputy editor of Nature, Nicholas Wade, has published on this, in book form — ‘A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race & Human History’ (2015, Penguin). There are many peer-reviewed academic papers on the basis of this in adaptation to cold climes (v Africa) and/or contrast in familiarity with agriculture (being far more recent in Africa), which requires a very different mindset and cognitive qualities than does foraging or mere husbandry.
As for ‘race’ supposedly being a construct of discrimination based on ‘race’: apart from being an absurd circular argument, it’s a confusion with perception in terms of ‘race’ being an arbitrary-set phenomenon. This does not imply the absence of reality of ‘race’! In fact, being in receipt of racial prejudice is on the basis of being male and in some significant sense ‘different’.
— See: ‘The Falsity of Identity Politics: Negative Attitude is Towards Males who are Different, in Policing Sexual Access by Gate-Keeping Group Membership’. New Male Studies 2019, 8(2), 20-51. ABSTRACT. Identity politics (often dubbed political correctness: PC) victim categories (protected characteristics) are shown to be false. Negative attitude is specifically towards males, and evoked by any form of significant difference. Previous findings that misogyny has no scientific basis, with the evidence instead of philogyny and misandry, extend to apply across all victim categories, trumping race or sexual orientation. This is revealed in the predominance of males as hate crime victims, the harsher attitude towards apparently more masculine subsets of sexual minority and race, and experimentally. Supposed homophobia is revealed to be a far wider phenomenon, encompassing all victim categories, manifest culturally in male initiation and scientifically evidenced across fields. It functions to gate-keep male full admission to the group, serving to police male sexual access, maximising reproductive efficiency, not to deal with out-group threat, nor to oppress (least of all females). Identity politics is extreme misrepresentation of social and inter-personal reality.
Literally didn’t say there were no biological differences, just none that are worthy of social relevance. So..
“none that are worthy of social relevance.”
If by this you mean, only in the context of public policy, OK.
But, if this applies in **any** context, that’s as preposterous as would be the claim that,
because the biological diffs between French and Germans are trivial, thus the linguistic diffs between those two groups are unworthy of social relevance in any context.
When, as I describe above, Derb advised his son about being near big groups of blacks, Derb was patently within his responsibility as a father to do so, regardless of the whinings of SJWs.
When Derb’s son encounters a big group of blacks, he may well have no time, and has **no duty**, to consult the works of Anthros etc., to assess the “reality” of Race as a Social Construct, or whatever.
“Descriptively, racial categories are an inaccurate method of delineating groups.”
In the context of public policy, OK.
In many, maybe most contexts, **no**.
“racial categories are an inaccurate method….”
A **totally** inaccurate method at predicting anything, e.g the propensity to get sickle-cell anemia, or inflict violence upon whites?
I say, the level of accuracy required varies, with the specific issue at hand, and the context in which it arises.
Until such time as the most influential segments of BLM, the MSM, etc., stop **their** race-baiting (esp. vs. Whiteness), race will be a quite important consideration, for those of who aim to avoid being Cancelled (e.g. by bricks, knives, social media mobs).